Francis Moore (geographer)

Francis Moore (baptized 1708, died in or after 1756) was a British travel writer of the eighteenth century.

Moore was born in Worcester, England, but few details are known about his early life. He came into prominence after publishing Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa in 1738. The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson attributed his commitment to the anti-slavery cause to reading the few experts on Africa of the time, including Moore.

Moore was appointed a writer (i.e., clerk) by the Royal African Company in 1730 and sailed for the company’s Gambia River entrepôt on July of that year. He left the region in April 1735 after also serving as a factor (agent) for the company. Moore was one of the first Englishmen to travel into the interior of Africa, serving in and visiting numerous towns and trading posts along the Gambia River from its mouth to the Guinea Highlands, hundreds of miles inland.

Moore’s observations were published as Travels Into the Interior Parts of Africa. The short account describes in rich detail the physical and cultural geography of the region before the intensification of the Atlantic slave trade and the resulting depopulation and economic disintegration. Moore’s work and Richard Jobson’s The Golden Trade were the only detailed accounts of Gambia before the colonial period.

Excerpts from Travels Into the Interior Parts of Africa were published in several subsequent volumes on exploration and the slave trade, including Samuel Johnson et al., The World Displayed (1740); Thomas Astley’s A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels (1745); and Elizabeth Donnan’s Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America (1931).

Moore related the saga of Job ben Solomon, also known as Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, in Travels Into the Interior Parts of Africa. Job was an African aristocrat taken by slavers in 1730 in an incident recorded by Moore. He was enslaved in Maryland until 1733, when he was sent to England after James Oglethorpe received a letter from him and purchased his freedom. After becoming well-known and respected in London society, Job returned to the Gambia, where he became re-acquainted with Moore.

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